Katowice mentioned in foreign direct investment ranking

Katowice was mentioned again for its FDI strategy by fDi Magazine – a Financial Times publication. In a study of the most promising investment locations in Europe, the city was ranked among top ten large European cities with the best strategy dedicated to foreign investors.

As in previous rankings, this year’s edition of the report – called European Cities and Regions of the Future 2016/17 – evaluated cities potential within five categories: economic potential, labour environment, cost effectiveness, infrastructure and business friendliness. Data was collected for 481 locations (294 cities, 148 regions and 39 local enterprise partnerships). Katowice was not qualified to the top tens under these five categories.

In addition, surveys were collected under a sixth category, FDI Strategy, for which there were 190 submissions. In this category, locations submitted details about their strategy for promoting FDI, which was then scored by fDi’s judging panel. In this category Katowice was ranked 5th of all large European cities of the future. Manchester, Glasgow and Munich were ranked first, second and third, respectively. Lyon holds the fourth position. Katowice was placed higher than Rotterdam and Frankfurt (6th and 7th position respectively).

Also, the fDi Magazine took into consideration the European regions. The Silesian voivodeship was mentioned in the cost effectiveness category and was ranked 5th of all large European regions of the future. The Nord-Est region in Romania came first in this category, the Polish Masovian voivodeship was ranked 8th.

To categorize cities, fDi took into account both the population of the immediate city and that of the larger urban zone. Large cities are cities with the immediate city population of more than 500 000 plus the larger urban zone of over 1 million, or the larger urban zone of more than 2 million people. In case of regions, there are more than 4 million inhabitants in a large region.

London and North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany were named as respective winners in the overall ranking of the European City and Region of the Future 2016/17 titles.